Redundancy in GENESIS64

Redundancy is installed as part of the full GENESIS64 installation. It allows you to run clients and servers so that if a primary client or server becomes unavailable its secondary one can take over. In this way, you guard against outages and failures so that loss of a machine does not mean you lose valuable production time. Each client and each server can have its own stand-by which is continuously updated and ready to become active at any time. If the active client or server becomes unavailable, its stand-by machine takes over.

Redundancy in GENESIS64 provides high availability similar to features found in large Distributed Control Systems. GENESIS64 Redundancy supports OPC standards, increasing the reliability and availability of OPC data by allowing multiple OPC servers to be configured into redundant pairs. These redundant OPC server pairs appear as a single OPC server to any OPC client application. Redundancy can be added to an existing OPC server/client application, without any reconfiguration of those applications; the only required downtime is a restart of the FrameWorX Server.

To set this up, you must have the parallel clients and servers available and attached, ready to be configured as redundant machines. Before we do that, though, let's look at how GENESIS64 is set up to handle redundant processing. The remainder of this topic describes the following:

GENESIS64 Architecture for Redundancy

Unlike GENESIS32, where the client applications (GraphWorX, TrendWorX Viewer, AlarmWorX Viewer) communicate directly with the servers, GENESIS64 introduces a middle-tier module known as FrameWorX Server (also called FwxServer). All client applications connect only to the FrameWorX Server. FrameWorX Server connects to other servers and services on behalf of the client applications and provides data to them. Below an illustration of redundancy in the GENESIS64 architecture. You can have redundant clients for GraphWorX64 Viewer, AlarmWorX64 Viewer, and TrendWorX64 Viewer, and you can make FrameWorX64 redundant so that your licensing and security is available at all times.

FrameWorX Server acts as a unifying layer between the servers and clients. Redundancy must be provided for:

the client level,
the server level, and
the unifying FrameWorX Server level.

GENESIS64 Support of Redundancy

GENESIS64 supports redundancy for 64-bit clients (GraphWorX64, AlarmWorX64, and TrendWorX64).

It also supports OPC and UA in both 64-bit and 32-bit servers:

Classic OPC DA (any platform)
OPC UA DA (any platform)
Classic OPC HDA with TrendWorX32 Server (from V9, 32-bit)
OPC UA HDA with Hyper Historian (from V10, 64-bit)
Classic OPC AE with both AlarmWorX64 and AlarmWorX32 Servers
AlarmLogger32
AlarmWorX64 Logger

Note that TrendWorX64 is not redundant.

How to Set up Redundancy in GENESIS64

Here in the online help, we tell you how to do the following. Click a list item to go to that topic.